A drug addict who held a tied-up woman at gunpoint in her own home before robbing jewellery and cash worth almost £60,000 has been jailed for 10-and-a-half years by Judge Frank O'Donnell at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
James Daly was jailed for 15 years in England in 1983 for grievous bodily harm and 12 years for a firearms offence.
Daly entered the home of Mrs Mary O'Connor, a woman in her 60s, in July 1999 after he observed her husband and daughter leaving the house. He held a sawn-off shotgun to her back as he forced her upstairs and made her lie down on the floor of the main bedroom. He tied her hands and feet together before putting the expensive items into a suitcase and leaving.
Daly fled to England after the robbery at Mrs O'Connor's and in February 2000 was jailed there for four years for burglary. Det Sgt Joe Molloy said Daly had been sentenced to 17 of the last 20 years in prison and had served 12 in total.
Daly (48), formerly of St Michael's Estate, Inchicore, Dublin pleaded guilty to the robbery and false imprisonment of Mrs O'Connor. He also admitted unlawful possession of two knives and a canister of CS gas on May 2nd, 1998 and possession of heroin on July 7th, 1998. He was extradited last August to face these charges.
Judge O'Donnell said there was no doubt the offences against Mrs O'Connor were the most serious and if Daly had been convicted after a trial he would have faced a much stiffer sentence.
Det Sgt Molloy told Ms Aileen Donelly BL, prosecuting, that Mrs O'Connor's husband was a jeweller and Daly knew this. He said Daly later told gardaí that he spent about £30,000 of the stolen items on heroin, which meant over £27,000 had never been recovered. Mrs O'Connor was extremely traumatised by the offence. Daly had been arrested the previous year after gardaí approached him on St Michael's Estate. They found two knives and a canister of CS gas on him.
Two months later he was arrested again, this time for the possession of heroin worth £60, which gardaí accepted was for his own use.
The last three-and-a-half years of Daly's sentence was suspended after Mr Luan O'Braonain BL, for Daly, argued that his client had been taking drugs since his early teens and was badly abused in Letterfrack since the age of seven.
He had also pleaded guilty to the offences.